VIDEO: Plimoth Grist Mill takes visitors back to the future

Did you know there are more astronauts than millers? And the best place to pause and reflect on that statistic is standing inside, near the face gear of the Plimoth Grist Mill, the newest addition to the experiences offered by Plimoth Plantation, as it begins to turn.

Did you know there are more astronauts than millers? And the best place to pause and reflect on that statistic is standing inside, near the face gear of the Plimoth Grist Mill, the newest addition to the experiences offered by Plimoth Plantation, as it begins to turn.

An operating gristmill produces a symphony of groans and creaks and mysterious thumps. There is the creak of the small iron wheel upstairs as it is turned by the miller, opening a channel of water to feed the buckets of the “breast wheel,” the emblematic wooden wheel on the outside of the mill building, with water from Town Brook.

As those buckets fill, gravity forces the wheel to turn and you hear a groan as it comes to life. If you are on the first floor, you’ll see and hear the immense face gear suddenly animate.

The face gear has 65 cogs and, as they begin to turn, they catch the 13 spindles of the lantern pinion gear (so called because it looks like an oversized lantern) and it, too, begins to spin (five times as fast as the face gear), transferring the power of the Brook via a long shaft (the spindle) to the runner stone that sits atop a 2,000-pound bed stone.

Don’t rush upstairs yet. In a minute or so, snow, of a sort, will begin to sift through the floorboards and down onto the mechanism. It’s snowing cornmeal.

But why, you might ask, are there more astronauts than millers?

Think of a gristmill as a ship. This one was built in the style and on the location where John Jenney built the first of its kind in Plymouth in 1636.

The analogy is not hard to imagine, as the sound of the mill is not unlike the creaking beneath the decks of a wooden ship as the wind comes up, sails fill, lines become taut and the rudder is turned.

It is the sound of a journey begun.

This mill is a ship that will, in many ways, allow Plimoth Plantation to journey farther than ever before.

The Plantation and the Mayflower – sitting near the mouth of Town Brook, just a saunter away from the mill, are forever anchored in 1627. The interpreters speak to you from their place in that year. But John and Sarah Jenney didn’t build the mill until 1636.

But it’s not just those years the mill gives the Plantation. The museum has made the conscious decision to allow the story of the mill – the story of the beginnings of American industry – to venture out decades, even centuries.

While the Plantation’s story is told in the voices of those who lived in 1627, the miller’s tale will be told in the vernacular of today and, because of that, it can venture in many directions, for centuries.

Page 2 of 3 - Like a giant clockwork from a science fiction film, the wheels and cogs and grinding stones of the Plimoth Grist Mill will enable imaginative visitors to move back and forth through history. They will tell a story of the mill’s specific technology and of the growth of Plimoth as the waters of the Brook were harnessed for other ventures – the milling of wood and iron and the ecology of the historic Town Brook. It will tell a tale of a colony becoming a town, a town becoming a county and a county growing into country.

If you need an astronaut or a miller, you can’t place an ad. So Plimoth Plantation trained one of its own. Longtime staff member Kim Van Wormer has assumed the role of miller at the Plimoth Grist Mill; something 17th century civilization would have found unsettling.

In keeping with the educational discipline that makes the Plantation such a rich, historical experience for visitors, the miller and her coworkers at the grist mill have been well schooled in the history and craft of milling, and the mill has been refurbished so it will be able to mill corn, at least twice a week.

The miller’s days will be spent going up and down a steep, narrow stairway, speaking to visitors on the first floor, standing in front or almost perched on top of the gristmills wooden mechanism, then leading visitors up those stairs where more than a ton of stone grinds the corn into meal, or a slightly coarser version similar to grits.

Days she produces that meal, she’ll have to heft heavy bags of raw corn up and into a wooden receptacle that feeds corn to the wheel. It’s not simply a matter of setting the wheel in motion and grinding the corn. There are adjustments to be made to the speed of the water wheel, the mechanism that feeds the corn into the apparatus, and controls that modify the distance between the runner stone and the bed stone, so the grist is of a desired consistency.

She’ll will have to keep her nose to the grindstone to detect whether the settings are too tight and the corn is beginning to burn. But the only way to really assess the grind is to go down those stairs and examine the ground corn coming down the wooden shoot and into the flour box. If it’s not right, then up you go to make more adjustments.

There have never been more than 150 official American astronauts and the latest number is less than half of that. But there are only a few dozen working mills left in America and, by definition, there can only be one miller for each grist mill.

The really interesting statistic is that there are nearly as many millers as astronauts. They seem, in a sense, to balance each other out. At one end are those holding fast to a technology of the past in order to give us a sense of where we have been. At the other are those entrusted to take us into the future.

Page 3 of 3 - The Plimoth Grist Mill is a pleasant way to go back to the future.